Freedom to Tinker

In a previous posting, “The Fallacy of the Almost-General-Purpose Computer,” I asked readers for help in finding a way to explain to non-techies why non-general-purpose computers are so vastly inferior to general-purpose ones.

Many readers responded with good suggestions. But Arnold Kling’s explanation is by far the best:

Trying to design a limited-purpose computer is like trying to design a limited-purpose spoken language. Imagine trying to design a language that can express only some thoughts but not others.

This seems to be a nearly perfect analogy. It’s technically sound, in the sense that the instruction set of a computer is really a language. And it conveys accurately the computer scientists’ intuition for why general-purpose computers are so valuable.

Dan Gillmor notes my posting on almost-general-purpose computers, and says

Felten would have been rolling his eyes yesterday at the Agenda 2003 conference, where three members of the Hollywood establishment proved their absolute cluelessness about technology while confirming the prevailing Washington “wisdom” – the notion that we can somehow stop one kind of copying without preventing all kinds of legitimate uses of computers.

Gillmor isn’t allowed to quote any conference attendees, but he points to John Patrick’s account of the proceedings, which says:

Next was a panel from the entertainment and publishing industry leaders discussed digital media. The hole in the protection scheme is that most of the content is still analog. A DVD starts out as digital but the output of a DVD player is analog and therefore can be easily copied. Once everything is digital, then watermarking can be easily used to protect the content. There was a good debate about “fair use”. The panelists and audience questioners could not even agree on what the scope of “fair use” is. Listening to the debate makes it clear that this issue is going to take a long time to resolve. I have written about this subject in Net Attitude but based on what I heard today, I plan to write more about the subject. The basic issue is that many consumers expect that when they buy a CD or DVD that they should have the right to make a backup copy of it and also place a copy on personally owned portable players and PCs. The industry representatives claimed they want to offer many choices but that the more choice you want the more you should have to pay. I think most of the audience believes that the industry is out of touch.

Today’s Washington Post quotes Fred von Lohmann of the EFF as saying that putting Hollywood in charge of technological progress would be like “putting the dinosaurs in charge of evolution.”

The Post article also includes this artfully constructed paragraph:

Hollywood wants to add a “digital flag,” or identifier, to coming digital television broadcasts, that would hamper copying. But Intel Corp., Philips Electronics NV and other hardware companies have balked at building anti-copying measures into their devices.

As I have written previously, digital TV standards already include a digital “broadcast flag.” What Intel, Philips, and others object to is not the broadcast flag itself, but restrictive regulation of their technologies. The article doesn’t quite say that the companies are objecting to the inclusion of a broadcast flag but the text is constructed in a way that probably leaves some readers with the wrong impression.

Some people have interpreted my previous posting, “The Fallacy of the Almost-General-Purpose Computer” as saying that the U.S. government views general-purpose computers as a threat. That’s not quite what I meant to say. What I meant to say was that in Washington law/policy/lobbyist circles, the proposition that general-purpose computers might be too dangerous is now (apparently) being taken seriously.

It’s almost always a mistake to talk about “the U.S. government” as having any particular view, as though the government were a monolithic entity that had a unitary viewpoint or a single coherent plan. Any organization so large necessarily will have multiple viewpoints jostling for influence, and its left hand will not know what its right hand is doing. This is especially true for the U.S. government, which was designed to include multiple competing voices, and not to centralize power in any one place.